Apple’s Most Expensive iPhone Borrowed This Feature From iPhone 5s That Came Out in 2013

Here is a fun bit of symmetry. Thirteen years ago today, on September 10, 2013, Apple walked on stage and introduced Touch ID on the iPhone 5S. A fingerprint sensor tucked into the home button, sapphire crystal on top, a steel ring around it to wake the sensor. It was an innovation that changed the way we unlocked phones and it is still one of the most used ones on phones, laptops, and tablets.

This week, on the same date, Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first folding phone and the most expensive iPhone it has ever made at Rs 2,99,900. And the way you unlock it is Touch ID. In the side button this time, but the same core idea Apple shipped in 2013 with the iPhone 5s.

Face ID Is Out on Apple’s Priciest iPhone Duo, and a 2013 Idea Is Back

Photo Credit: Apple

For a company that spent the last decade telling us Face ID was the future, that is a quietly remarkable U-turn.

How we got here

Apple introduced Face ID with the iPhone X in 2017 and began phasing Touch ID out of its phones almost immediately. By the time the home button disappeared entirely, Touch ID had come to feel like a relic, the thing your older relatives' iPhones still had.

It never fully died as it hung on in the iPhone SE, in the power buttons of several iPads, and in every MacBook. But on the flagship iPhone, fingerprint unlocking had been gone for years, replaced by a face scan Apple clearly considered superior.

So why bring it back now, on the phone that matters most?

The fold made the decision for them

The answer is the shape. Face ID needs a TrueDepth camera array, and that array needs to sit somewhere. On a folding phone with two displays, a hinge, dual batteries and a camera system all fighting for millimetres, finding room for the Face ID hardware is a genuine engineering problem.

Touch ID in the side button sidesteps all of it. It works whether the Duo is open or closed, it does not eat into the display, and it does not care which way you are holding a phone that can be held several ways.

What looks like nostalgia is really just physics. The most practical place to put authentication on a foldable turned out to be the same place Apple started thirteen years ago.

The irony nobody at Apple will say out loud

There is something poetic about the priciest iPhone in history leaning on a feature Apple spent years trying to retire. Touch ID was designed for a Rs 53,500 phone in 2013. It returns on one that costs nearly six times that.

The technology has moved on, of course. The sensor is faster, more secure, wired into the Secure Enclave in ways the 5S could only dream of. But the fundamental promise is unchanged, put your finger on the button and the phone knows it is you.

Sometimes the best idea is the one you already had. Apple just needed a phone that folds to remember it.